The Moral: Stay Out Until the Wind is Right
By Mike Handley
Tom Allen likes to nickname the whitetails on his Most Wanted list.
There was Hollywood, who liked to mug for trail cameras, and Girth Brooks, whose rack carried 42 inches of mass. In 2023 and 2024, he was chasing Zeus.
“This deer was like the god of the woods,” grinned the 34-year-old heavy equipment operator from Lore City, Ohio.
Key word: was.
Tom didn’t settle on a monicker for the Guernsey County buck the first year they became acquainted. When he collected the initial trail camera images of it in July 2022, the likely 3 1/2-year-old was wearing about 140 inches of antler — not really special, but clearly possessing potential.
The nameless up-and-comer packed on another 40 inches of antler the following year, making it a much larger blip on the deer hunter’s radar. Even so, Tom learned very little about the buck’s habits.
“Zeus never took the same trail twice,” Tom said. “He was very hard to pattern. I couldn’t do it.”
As the season progressed, Tom learned the buck was seen chasing does 4 miles away. He took comfort in the fact that he never heard of anyone in the vicinity taking a 180-class Typical.
In June 2024, Tom was with his father when they decided — almost as an afterthought — to drive past the farm where Zeus had most often been seen. They spotted the deer at the back of a bean field, all by itself.
Bucks’ racks were just starting to develop, but this one’s antlers were already pushing the 160 mark.
“Dad said, ‘That’s going to be a monster,’ and I realized I’d seen those big brow tines before,” Tom said. “It was Zeus.”
For the rest of the summer, Tom and a buddy collected a couple of hours of video footage of the big-bodied 5-year-old in the beans, recording the weekly progress of the rack’s phenomenal growth. This time, the formerly typical rack was festooned with irregular growth as well.
He also deployed more than 20 trail cameras, half of them sending images to his phone. Despite the number of devices, Tom collected precious few images of the deer at the top of his list.
In October, however, Zeus passed in front of the lens right before legal shooting light on the 10th, 13th, 14th and 15th. Tom decided to try his luck for the first time on the 16th, a Wednesday, because a north wind was forecasted.
He went in at midmorning, hung a stand on a stream bank and left. He returned to sit in it around 4:30.
A few minutes before 6 p.m., he looked up from his phone and spotted Zeus only 65 yards distant.
“Just watching him walk through the woods was incredible,” he said. “He looked like a 300-incher.”
The deer came 24 yards closer and hung around for 11 minutes. Tom had time to video the regal animal, which helped settle his nerves.
Finally realizing the buck wasn’t going to stay there for much longer, Tom launched an arrow at 6:09. The double-lunged deer jumped the nearby stream and managed to go 40 yards before collapsing.
When Tom reached the deer, he sat down to look at it.
“I began crying like a baby,” he admitted.
The emotion remained with him for a long time. He even drove to the landowner’s home to thank and hug the farmer and his wife.
“It’s a bittersweet thing, really,” Tom says of arrowing his career-best buck. “Of course I’m glad it’s over, but now I wake up with nothing to look at.”
Tom took his rack to by scored by Buckmasters measurers Toby and Lori Hughes, a 2 1/2-hour drive. The 22-pointer tallied an even 217 inches.
Tom is affiliated with the
Buckeye Boyz Outdoors Youtube channel. The video of his hunt, as well as the December scoring session, should be available in February.